/Oh, I'll just open this empty bottle by the waste bottles and use it as the new RCA-2 acid waste bottle. Surely, this has been rinsed, and SON OF A biatch THEY DIDN'T RINSE IT AND THE TINY BIT OF HCL LEFT ALL VAPORIZED DAMN THAT STINGS//I'm still an idiot for not opening that in the hood, but it was *empty*.

There was a certain midwest engineering college that gave all the incoming freshman the following assignment:

Make a chemically powered model car

There were quite a few well meaning but mediocre students who settled for simple (safe) chemical reactions, such as combining vinegar and baking soda to make water and CO2. Some others were a little more adventurous.

One young student, not really knowing chemistry (but figuring he did), just walked down to the chemical storeroom and asked for "strong hydrochloric acid". The stockroom guy, apparently devoid of sense, looked around and found an ancient bottle of 8 molar HCL. Figuring that the kid knew what he was asking for, handed over the acid.

The wayward freshman proceeded with the bottle back to his dorm room to experiment. This is where things get a little fuzzy, but it suffices to say that in the course of said activity his bottle shattered. Three floors of the dorm were evacuated for several hours while the gasses vented. The wayward freshman was first hosed down by the school and then had to stand outside at some length with no pants on. It's rumored that when he returned to his room his keyboard had melted and fused onto his desk, and that all metal surfaces (including his roommates) had become severely rusted.

Following this incident the chemical stockroom implemented stricter controls over who was allowed access to ancient bottles of extremely strong acids.

/to say nothing of hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane and the aptly-named FOOF

In computer nerddom, F00F--with zeros instead of ohs--was a bug in the original Pentium where unprivileged applications could freeze the CPU until a hard reset or power cycle. This was done using the illegal instruction "lock cmpxchg8b eax". The fact that it was an illegal instruction--cmpxchg8b makes no sense when used on a register rather than memory--combined with "lock" confused the Pentium into getting into a bad state.

As in chemistry, the "foof" nickname came from its symbol, so to speak: the bytes representing "lock cmpxchg8b eax" were F0 0F C7 C8.

I work at a major aerospace manufacturer that uses full immersion chem lines that feature, among others, hydrochloric and hydroflouric acids. I was fortunate to never witness one, but I understand that a fissure in a tank line or a spill can produce a colorful cloud-o-death. My father-in-law that's been a manufacturing engineer there for some 30 years told me he once saw a man who didn't evacuate quickly enough and was exposed to a cloud from an acid spill. He said the guy started down the stairs, collapsed, and fell the remaining steps. When they were finally able to get to him, the dude was basically goo; like all the bones had been removed from his body.

/So glad I no longer work in a building with a chem line, never felt comfortable working around them.

One of our idiots in the lab decided he was going to sneak some out of the plant because he figured it would clear a blocked drain at home. He put it in a plastic bottle, put the bottle in his lunch box and set it on the desk in hi office. He came back a few minutes later and the acid had eaten all through his lunch box, across the top, peeled paint off the desk and he freaked. He just new he was going to get fired. I'm not sure what he told them happened. Hell, it even ate some finish off of the brand new clay tile in the lab. He's damn lucky he didn't get some on his leg. I'm still not sure what it would have done to the plumbing in his house.

Felgraf:Could be true, though the physicist in me is skeptical, if only because that's a good way to get your paper shot down by follow ups.

Well, i can't find confirmation, so it could be bull, but the part of the story I forgot above is that they changed Yb to Y in the page proofs. So the publication is correct as printed. No one was supposed to do lab work to review the paper, just accept that what they were saying was true. I know someone at U of H who knows Prof Chu, they could ask, but not sure if he's around or would admit to such a thing. No clue who the reviewers were either. This was a grapevine thing I heard a couple of years after.

When I did some big industry work they made us be all "The alloy was AxByCz" when presenting things. I hated it. Just tell me I can't present if your precious secret can't be told.

I'm not sure if HF is odorless. I found it odd that we don't have to wear breathing air for drum changeouts. Maybe the company we purchase from adds something to make it smell, but I swear the stuff has a smell. I dunno. Lots of companies make these chemicals.

yes, HF exposure is not dramatic, but rarely turns out well. You adsorb it too quickly for showers and that other crap to help much. You just sort of fall apart and die. Parts of the process hurt. Your don't "burn" like other acids. It messes up nerve signals so you don't get the sizzle and Oh God shiat phase. You get all the other parts though.

Another reason why HF sucks so bad, is because they will not give you pain meds. Medics need to be able to have you tell them where it hurts so they can do their job accordingly. This stuff ain't no Robocop acid.

Mr_Moto:Probably because if only you were a chemist, it would have been really f***in' obvious that you needed to do (whatever it was).

Probably. I know at least one reaction a collaborator was doing wasn't working. They contacted the researcher."Oh! The entire reaction has to be done under nitrogen." "... At no point does your paper even suggest this." "Well, yeah, it's implied in the field we published in!" (And that collaborator *was* a chemist...)

It's a weak acid in chemical terms, so it doesn't do the normal 'acid' thing. However it does diffuse through your skin quite easily, and once it's inside your body the fluoride ion binds very strongly to any calcium ions it can find. Since your body uses those calcium ions for other purposes such as staying alive or holding your bones together, this leads to adverse consequences (sometimes hours after the exposure).

Don't forget the bonus fun points of odorless and colorless, so it *looks* like it's just water!

Penetrates your skin easily, which you don't feel so much, and attacks your bones, which you do. If your bones start to dissolve, the treatment is injection of calcium gluconate deep under the skin, next to the bone. It is said to be intensely painful.

There are bio agents that are much worse tho. One woman I dated was working with a digest enzyme that would dissolve flesh like gasoline dissolves styrofoam. Getting that on your skin would be worse than any acid.

It's been a looong time since I took chem. I called it quits in the lab as a job when I realized I was too lazy to keep up proper safety in the lab on a day-in-day-out basis (forgetting gloves, goggles, periodically, that sort of thing.) Other than getting a few snoot fulls of HCl, never ran into any truly awful stuff that I recall.

What does HF do to you?

I got out of the Chem business years (or likely, decades) before you left your lab job, so I'm going from a very hazy memory, but I seem to recall that in a lab, it was more dangerous as a calcium-reactive poison than for the properties you'd typically expect from a strong acid. I changed majors 2 years into ChemE because I found it to be obnoxiously boring and tedious, and probably because I didn't pay as much attention as I should have.

And for the curious, here is the MSDS for Honeywells batch of HF. I believe they are the worlds largest supplier. A nice looking PDF in my opinion. A lot of MSDS sheets are still look like they were typed on a typerwriter.

It's a weak acid in chemical terms, so it doesn't do the normal 'acid' thing. However it does diffuse through your skin quite easily, and once it's inside your body the fluoride ion binds very strongly to any calcium ions it can find. Since your body uses those calcium ions for other purposes such as staying alive or holding your bones together, this leads to adverse consequences (sometimes hours after the exposure).

Agonizing pain due to calcium fluoride crystals forming in your blood, nasty disfiguration of the tissue where the exposure occurred, or good old-fashioned cardiac arrest (due to a depletion of calcium). Good times...

It's a weak acid in chemical terms, so it doesn't do the normal 'acid' thing. However it does diffuse through your skin quite easily, and once it's inside your body the fluoride ion binds very strongly to any calcium ions it can find. Since your body uses those calcium ions for other purposes such as staying alive or holding your bones together, this leads to adverse consequences (sometimes hours after the exposure).

It's been a looong time since I took chem. I called it quits in the lab as a job when I realized I was too lazy to keep up proper safety in the lab on a day-in-day-out basis (forgetting gloves, goggles, periodically, that sort of thing.) Other than getting a few snoot fulls of HCl, never ran into any truly awful stuff that I recall.

What does HF do to you?

Makes flesh necrotic, leaches the calcium from your bones and replaces it with fluorine (good luck ever getting THAT out, if you live long enough for it to be a problem), and the best part is that it kills your nerve endings so you don't even feel the burn until it's far too late to do anything about it.

Hack Patooey:Rwa2play: Felgraf: Also, at least it wasn't Piranha Solution. Mother of god that stuff scares me. I really, REALLY do not like working with it *at all*.

Looks at what Piranha Solution is....

Ummm yeah, I don't wanna be within 1000 feet of that stuff either.

No kidding. I know nothing about organic chemistry, so Ive been reading names, and spending time at Wikipedia. Holy crap, most of this stuff is nasty! I swear I read one that said "...is so dangerous it will sneak out of the lab, take the #12 bus, and kill you and your family at home." Glad I'm in software.

Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" is my go-to jumping-off place for stuff like this. We've got chlorine triflouride, "during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using it in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with." The classic dioxygen difluoride, "often referred to in the literature by its evocative formula of FOOF." If 8 nitrogens in a row was too stable, here's ten nitrogens in a row, and if ten's not enough, we can go back to Derek's blog for N-amino azidotetrazole, "two carbons, fourteen nitrogens, and no hydrogens at all, a formula that even Klapötke himself, who clearly has refined sensibilities when it comes to hellishly unstable chemicals, calls "exciting". Trust me, you don't want to be around when someone who works with azidotetrazoles comes across something "exciting"..."

Hack Patooey:Rwa2play: Felgraf: Also, at least it wasn't Piranha Solution. Mother of god that stuff scares me. I really, REALLY do not like working with it *at all*.

Looks at what Piranha Solution is....

Ummm yeah, I don't wanna be within 1000 feet of that stuff either.

No kidding. I know nothing about organic chemistry, so Ive been reading names, and spending time at Wikipedia. Holy crap, most of this stuff is nasty! I swear I read one that said "...is so dangerous it will sneak out of the lab, take the #12 bus, and kill you and your family at home." Glad I'm in software.

Dimethylmercury is the most frightening; a substance so toxic its use has been discontinued because getting a few drops on you will kill you if you're not treated in time.

jshine:blue_2501: Rwa2play: jshine: jshine: Hollie Maea: My workplace has all sorts of stuff trying to kill me. The HCl and KOH are pretty tame but I don't trust the Nitric or the HF or that bastard Silane.

Google nickel tetracarbonyl.

Or dimethylmercury.

Wow, just a few drops kills. Ummmm, wow.

Tell me again why folks bother with sarin gas?

Sarin is still more toxic, but importantly, it is not persistent. If you sprayed dimethylmercury on your enemy, the land would remain toxic for a long time. It would be like the Romans salting the fields of their enemies. Sarin kills and is then gone very quickly, so you don't kill your own troops too. Also, sarin (an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor) poisoning is somewhat easier to treat than heavy metal poisoning if you do have an "oops" moment...

Also, sarin kills quickly, which probably is pretty important for a weapon. At low doses, dimethylmercury could take months.

Mr_Moto:Probably because if only you were a chemist, it would have been really f***in' obvious that you needed to do (whatever it was).

It's actually revenge for physicists leaving major steps in derivations out of their papers, and sometimes not fixing mistakes in the symbols or whatever.

Reminds me of a supposedly true story - the people who came up with a high temperature superconductor (YBCO, where the Y=yttrium) put it in the paper being peer reviewed as Yb = Ytterbium. A deliberate "mistake" to prevent some other lab copying. The world market price for Ytterbium suddenly shot up. The authors must have been laughing their asses off thinking of all the people trying to synthesize a material with the wrong element.

blue_2501:Rwa2play: jshine: jshine: Hollie Maea: My workplace has all sorts of stuff trying to kill me. The HCl and KOH are pretty tame but I don't trust the Nitric or the HF or that bastard Silane.

Google nickel tetracarbonyl.

Or dimethylmercury.

Wow, just a few drops kills. Ummmm, wow.

Tell me again why folks bother with sarin gas?

Sarin is still more toxic, but importantly, it is not persistent. If you sprayed dimethylmercury on your enemy, the land would remain toxic for a long time. It would be like the Romans salting the fields of their enemies. Sarin kills and is then gone very quickly, so you don't kill your own troops too. Also, sarin (an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor) poisoning is somewhat easier to treat than heavy metal poisoning if you do have an "oops" moment...

Peki:And this thread has totally inspired me to go back to school to learn some chemistry. I want to learn to read a molecule diagram and go "oh crap" or giggle because everyone is freaking out over water.

Good for you, but just a warning: the biatch of chemistry is that (unlike biology or physics) it takes a long time to get to the really good stuff. You might look for the condensed/combo classes they often teach for nurses or bio majors, otherwise it's two FULL years before you can even start thinking about things like biochemistry. I'm sure there are MOOCs that do the condensed thing, too. Not a good enough foundation if you're going to be a physical scientist or go to med school, but more than fine for brain expansion.

Glockenspiel Hero:Every chemist has a great store of tales like this. I managed to open a stuck jar of KOH pellets once and ended up flinging them all over the place. I got most of them but missed two- one ate a hole in my pocket, the other I found about ten minutes later when I noticed my hair felt funny. Dissolved it all very nicely down to a bald spot.

I also managed to turn my arm orange when I splashed fuming nitric all over it while nitrating cotton balls, (Damn ice bath cubes locked up when I was trying to move the flask)

Still, nowhere near as bad as walking past an organic lab and smelling new mown hay. Umm, guys, you might want to evacuate pronto...

Rwa2play:Felgraf: Also, at least it wasn't Piranha Solution. Mother of god that stuff scares me. I really, REALLY do not like working with it *at all*.

Looks at what Piranha Solution is....

Ummm yeah, I don't wanna be within 1000 feet of that stuff either.

No kidding. I know nothing about organic chemistry, so Ive been reading names, and spending time at Wikipedia. Holy crap, most of this stuff is nasty! I swear I read one that said "...is so dangerous it will sneak out of the lab, take the #12 bus, and kill you and your family at home." Glad I'm in software.

Long time lab tech....worked with lots of strong acids....perchloric and HF demanded the most respect.....only one burn ever....pinhole leak in glove+glacial acetic acid=serious fu*king nasty pain!....lost outer layer of skin off most of my index finger....think tender pink stuff after you pop a blister.....

Every chemist has a great store of tales like this. I managed to open a stuck jar of KOH pellets once and ended up flinging them all over the place. I got most of them but missed two- one ate a hole in my pocket, the other I found about ten minutes later when I noticed my hair felt funny. Dissolved it all very nicely down to a bald spot.

I also managed to turn my arm orange when I splashed fuming nitric all over it while nitrating cotton balls, (Damn ice bath cubes locked up when I was trying to move the flask)

Still, nowhere near as bad as walking past an organic lab and smelling new mown hay. Umm, guys, you might want to evacuate pronto...

In many chem labs, HCl is one of the least dangerous things you work with.

I do 50% HF regularly (digestion for elemental analysis), piranha occasionally, have a synthesis with dimethyl sulfate coming up where I'll have to warn coworkers to run the fark away and pull the fire alarm if they see me lying on the floor, because we don't need additional casualties form someone coming into a room where we have a release.

I worked with HF and piranha on a daily basis in grad school. Respect it, be careful, but fear will cause mistakes. Of course, being a complete dumbass will cause mistakes too, like the grad student who got caught stirring HF with a gloved finger. He was banned from the lab for a couple of weeks while he went through safety training about ten more times.

Tchernobog:Ugh. I work with Hydrofluoric acid daily...not good stuff. Especially if you have any cuts/scrapes, anything.

/Use it to strip chrome/aluminum

Galvanizing plant here. We work with - at most - a 15% HCL/H2O solution and if you have a cut you know it quickly. What's worse is the caustic acid we use as a first step - a 50% solution accidentally sprayed on me a couple years ago and burned one leg enough that I ended up at the doctors. Felt like wasp stings until I got it hosed off.

doglover:At least it wasn't HF or some other solution. HCl will burn you pretty bad, but it's natural. You make it in your stomach. HF isn't natural and while it won't eat dead meat like in Breaking Bad, it will kill you. It's contact poison and can give you a heart attack, or just go to town inside your body and do all kinds of nasty.

"Natural" or not doesn't have anything to do with it (particularly since it is an arbitrary distinction). The reason HF is so dangerous is simply because of the electronegativity and size of fluoride.

And they screwed up the science as that acid eats your bones from the inside out and they showed bones as the only remains. HF is much more insidious than HCL. It smells awful. I'd take hydrochloric acid over hydrofluroic any day.

You want scary situations go in to any high school chem lab older than 10 years - there's about a 1% chance that someone has invested the time and money to have sufficient and proper storage for strong acids and bases. If you're lucky they're in different cabinets - chances are the hinges have just about corroded away.

doglover:At least it wasn't HF or some other solution. HCl will burn you pretty bad, but it's natural. You make it in your stomach. HF isn't natural and while it won't eat dead meat like in Breaking Bad, it will kill you. It's contact poison and can give you a heart attack, or just go to town inside your body and do all kinds of nasty.

I initially read the headline as saying HF, and my heart sank. I would not wish HF exposure on the worst of my enemies.

doglover:At least it wasn't HF or some other solution. HCl will burn you pretty bad, but it's natural. You make it in your stomach. HF isn't natural and while it won't eat dead meat like in Breaking Bad, it will kill you. It's contact poison and can give you a heart attack, or just go to town inside your body and do all kinds of nasty.

There was a certain midwest engineering college that gave all the incoming freshman the following assignment:

Make a chemically powered model car

There were quite a few well meaning but mediocre students who settled for simple (safe) chemical reactions, such as combining vinegar and baking soda to make water and CO2. Some others were a little more adventurous.

One young student, not really knowing chemistry (but figuring he did), just walked down to the chemical storeroom and asked for "strong hydrochloric acid". The stockroom guy, apparently devoid of sense, looked around and found an ancient bottle of 8 molar HCL. Figuring that the kid knew what he was asking for, handed over the acid.

The wayward freshman proceeded with the bottle back to his dorm room to experiment. This is where things get a little fuzzy, but it suffices to say that in the course of said activity his bottle shattered. Three floors of the dorm were evacuated for several hours while the gasses vented. The wayward freshman was first hosed down by the school and then had to stand outside at some length with no pants on. It's rumored that when he returned to his room his keyboard had melted and fused onto his desk, and that all metal surfaces (including his roommates) had become severely rusted.

Following this incident the chemical stockroom implemented stricter controls over who was allowed access to ancient bottles of extremely strong acids.

Similar thing happened at my campus. The doofus didn't realize the handle on the bucket was loose and swung it like a pail of water. A litre of 11 M HCl in a second floor lab. The entire wing was evacuated and all the tiling had to be replaced when it was melted into a puddle of cheap vinyl goo. One unfortunate girl inhaled a wiff in the panic and got a lung infection for three weeks from the damage.

The dumbasses in my class can't figure out why I keep reminding them to put on gloves before they handle the concentrated acid stock bottles. I don't care about them, I'd just rather not see someone's flesh get melted off in front of me.

Suckmaster Burstingfoam:I spilled some HCl all over my arm in lab once. Freaked out for a sec, then just sat there and watched my wet arm do nothing. Rinsed it off after a minute or so then told the TA his HCl sucks and is ghey.

There was a certain midwest engineering college that gave all the incoming freshman the following assignment:

Make a chemically powered model car

There were quite a few well meaning but mediocre students who settled for simple (safe) chemical reactions, such as combining vinegar and baking soda to make water and CO2. Some others were a little more adventurous.

One young student, not really knowing chemistry (but figuring he did), just walked down to the chemical storeroom and asked for "strong hydrochloric acid". The stockroom guy, apparently devoid of sense, looked around and found an ancient bottle of 8 molar HCL. Figuring that the kid knew what he was asking for, handed over the acid.

The wayward freshman proceeded with the bottle back to his dorm room to experiment. This is where things get a little fuzzy, but it suffices to say that in the course of said activity his bottle shattered. Three floors of the dorm were evacuated for several hours while the gasses vented. The wayward freshman was first hosed down by the school and then had to stand outside at some length with no pants on. It's rumored that when he returned to his room his keyboard had melted and fused onto his desk, and that all metal surfaces (including his roommates) had become severely rusted.

Following this incident the chemical stockroom implemented stricter controls over who was allowed access to ancient bottles of extremely strong acids.

In the Penn State dorm rules, there's one addendum that obviously has a backstory. Sadly, it predated the 2004 class sufficiently that the RA who showed me was unawares of the deets.

Anyway, the rule is the last rule on appropriate hallway use. It reads something like "No go-karts, rocket powered cars, or similar vehicles are permitted to be ridden in the hallways."

At least it wasn't HF or some other solution. HCl will burn you pretty bad, but it's natural. You make it in your stomach. HF isn't natural and while it won't eat dead meat like in Breaking Bad, it will kill you. It's contact poison and can give you a heart attack, or just go to town inside your body and do all kinds of nasty.